- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Pixelfed has been making incredible strides over the past few years, and has begun developing a suite of different platforms and services for the #Fediverse. After just one day on Kickstarter, they’ve already smashed their campaign goal.
But they still need your help!
Ok, so I spent the weekend getting my own Pixelfed instance working for my friends who want off Instagram.
My big question, is how do you discover new content?
Sure you can follow people on other instances, but how do you find them in the first place?
Also, basically all of the content I’ve been able to find so far has been artsy photos of fences and beaches and whatnot. It’s pretty and all, but there’s not much of humanity in my feed.
It’s really hard with small, starting instances.
Basically, the only content that gets federated to you is content produced by someone that a person on your instance follows. And once it federates to you, it becomes searchable and viewable to other members on your instance. Which means that the more people you have, the more content gets federated too you, and the easier it is for your users to find new content.
And new users that no one on your instance follows at all won’t appear to any of your users in searches etc, which is where “boosting” a post comes in. If I post a photo, and no one on your instance follows me, none of your users will see it. But if someone that they do follow, follows me and likes my photo, they “boost” it, and then it appears in the timelines of people that follow them. And then once a single person on your instance starts following me, my future content will start federating to you.
Which means that as an admin, the best thing you can do is start up a seed account, and just follow lots and lots of people. Follow random people. Follow anyone and everyone, just so you get a critical mass of content sliding to your instance.
This is a problem that all fediverse platforms suffer from. The initial hump to get good visibility of federated content is a challenge. Once you cross it, you’re fine, but to cross it, you either need to be patient and give it time, or you need to artificially kickstart it
Peertube does not suffer from this actually. On Peertube, the instances (servers) follow each other. Making all the content available on both.
That’s an interesting idea. I was wondering how it would scale, but as the network grows, even if it just grabbed some random stuff from remote instances, it would still help it grow by giving the local instance plenty of content to seed from
If you don’t hate bluesky, that’s an option as well: https://fed.brid.gy/
follow some of the bigger hashtags to get input, from there you can branch out and follow specific accounts (and unfollow the original hashtags if you want).
a few bigger ones are bloomscrolling caturday mastoart photography silentsunday fensterfreitag
Right, but hashtags only show posts on my instance which at the moment is just me.
hmm apologies, I didn’t realize that personal instances were like that. I’m on pixelfed.de so I just shared what worked for me a few days ago.
I’m guessing you could search for a few accounts on various servers to follow directly who post with those hashtags to get the ball rolling?
Yeah, but that’s the thing. You can only search if you know the exact username of the user on the other server. But you can’t find usernames on other servers without creating an account there.
I wish it was more like Lemmy where you can browse other instances without an account at that instance.
if you feel ok sharing your pixel then I cab follow you there, might give you an in?
@[email protected]
followed :) hope it works
Thanks!
Though I appear to be having trouble having people follow me from other servers. I don’t see you in my followers list, and when I tried following a test account on another server, I didn’t see their posts. Not sure what’s going on. Does it just take a while for the servers to sync?
Do you see any of my posts?
How do you find someone on Instagram if you are not an Instagram user?
How do you find something on Mazda Forum if you are on Reddit?
How you find something on AVForums if you are on AVS Forum?
The fediverse has way, way, way more in common with the Internet of 2005 than it does with the Internet of 2025. You have to act more like it’s 20 years ago.
Pixelfed not a centralized service. It’s a web engine. It’s something that lets you host your own photo sharing website. If you want to syndicate stuff from someone else’s website, you need to find it on their website first. Fediverse websites just let you do the syndicating by automated request.
To initiate the syndication request, you take the post/user’s original URL, paste it into your website’s search bar, and then hit enter. It will request and fetch that content, creating a local copy for you. From there, you can follow the person who originally posted it, creating an auto-syndication relationship.
If you’re trying to promote federation, this isn’t the way to go about it.
Ok, but if I don’t have an account on their instance, how do I even find their URL?
I think they’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. On any other social media site, you find people by their username. So just ask for your friends username ([email protected]) and put it in the search bar and it’ll come up. Using the URL can be convenient on desktop because you can just copy and paste it from the address bar when you’re looking at someone’s profile.
And if you want to discover new people where you don’t already know their username, then I believe that is the same as any other social media as well, you can come across them in the comments of people you follow or go to the discover tab or search hashtags and you’ll find new people that you can tap on and follow.
I feel like this basically covers how you would find people. A lot of people get hung up on how you know what instance other people are on but it doesn’t usually matter. Either someone will give you their username which includes @instance.com, or if you don’t know the instance you can search for their name and all known accounts with that name will show up.
For example if I just search my username “BakedCatboy” (not my real username), the search results show both my mastodon and Pixelfed accounts.
That makes sense. It is a bit ironic. Like everyone wants to go back to old Instagram where you just keep up with friends, but I think we’ve all grown accustomed to our feeds and our friends don’t have enough cute cats and dogs to accommodate our interests.
Search using tags like #comics or #food. That should give you an idea of how it works.
Edit: oh I might be wrong for new instances without established links.